F. William Engdahl
Hello Dear Readers,
In this issue I would like to discuss the clear phobia of NATO and especially, Anglo-American powers, against Russia. If we go back to the days of President George H.W. Bush at the end of the 1980s, we find an agenda of lies and deception from the US against the Gorbachev Soviet Union, an agenda that deployed new techniques of regime change that destroyed the USSR. Here I share a chapter from my book, Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance, describing the hidden role of the CIA, and a new US Government NGO called NED, to create chaos and install a CIA puppet, Boris Yeltsin, to oversee the literal economic rape of Russia on behalf of Western corporate groups. The unbelievable plunder of Russia, termed “shock therapy,” was only halted in 1999 with the election of an unknown former KGB officer from St Petersburg named Vladimir Putin to replace a destroyed Yeltsin. To understand the intensity of hatred of Putin today by the western powers we must know this hidden history.
support for my online voice. The relentless censorship of the Internet and social media by the private corporate social media companies since the 2020 covid fake pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine, is alarming and damaging and can only be compared with book burnings in the Germany of the 1930s, or the Medieval Inquisitions with torture of heretics.
I thank you again for your interest and support,
William Engdahl
www.williamengdahl.com
Manifest Destiny © F. William Engdahl
Chapter Three: The Rape of Russia: The CIA’s Yeltsin Coup d’État
The corrupt Yeltsin atop a tank used in the CIA coup
“The largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history. . .”
—Mortimer Zuckerman, member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, owner of US News & World Report, describing what took place in the looting of Russia under Yeltsin
Russia’s Yeltsin Catastrophe
Boris Yeltsin and his “free market reformers” were part of one of the most hidden and most criminal looting operations in CIA history. It was the rape of Russia by a corrupt circle of treasonous Soviet KGB generals, together with their select young KGB protégés, who were transformed through the operation into billionaire oligarchs. It was an economic rape only made possible through Western banks and the so-called “democracy machinery” of Washington under three successive presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Few people in the West could grasp the anger of Russian President Vladimir Putin when he told a select audience of Russian politicians from the Duma in the Kremlin in September 2016, “You know how I feel about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was unnecessary. We could have introduced reforms, including those of a more democratic nature, without allowing this.”[i]
Putin did not need to describe “this.” Everyone present knew he meant the savage destruction of life, feeling of worth, and pride for most Russians after 1990. If anyone in the US or the EU thought about Putin’s comments—coming amid an unprecedented US and NATO vilification and demonization campaign against the Russian Federation and Putin personally, including economic sanctions—they most likely saw it as confirmation of Washington claims that Putin’s Russia was out to rebuild the Soviet Union.
What was unknown to most in the West was the true background of the destruction of life in Russia and the former member states of the USSR. The CIA operation began near the end of the 1980s with a network of CIA actors and their corrupted, bought-and-paid-for Soviet KGB generals.
It was called the Yeltsin Era, and it lasted the entire decade of the 1990s until Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. His resignation had been finally forced by a group of nationalist Russians led by a forty-seven-year-old former KGB officer who briefly headed the successor organization to the KGB known as the SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The SVR man was Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, by then Yeltsin’s Prime Minister.
The destruction of the Soviet Union was one of the darkest criminal operations ever undertaken by the US government or, more precisely, by a dark, deep state network buried inside that Washington bureaucracy, sometimes referring to themselves as “the Vulcans,” often simply called neoconservatives.
The key roles in the rape of Russia were played by US President George H.W. Bush and later by Bush’s close friend and protégé, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton. The venom directed from Washington towards Putin personally since his reelection as president in 2012 and even beginning his revitalization of Russia after his ascendency to the presidency on December 31, 1999, the day Yeltsin was forced to abdicate his imagined throne, would become clear. Slowly details emerged of what crimes Bush, Clinton, and their covert intelligence circles committed against Russia after 1989.
Bush’s CIA “Old Boys”
George H.W. Bush, former director of the CIA, ran the entire foreign and national security operations of President Ronald Reagan from the Office of the Vice President. Through Executive Order 12333, a national security directive drafted by then vice president Bush and signed by Reagan, Bush had made sure he was in charge of all Reagan-era US foreign and national security operations after 1981.
People close to CIA Chief Bill Casey said that as President, Reagan had little interest in foreign policy. The true role of Bush in the Reagan years was well hidden, however.
When Bush’s son George W. Bush took office as President in 2001, one of his first acts was to sign Executive Order 13233, an extraordinary act that cited “national security” as grounds to conceal records of past presidents, especially his father’s activities during the 1990 and 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist Eastern Europe states. Consequently, those records are no longer accessible to the public.[ii] The truth can be gathered by evidence of participants in Russia, Eastern Europe, and in the USA, deep research, and congressional and other testimonies of those with direct knowledge. The picture of the destruction that resulted is staggering.
George H.W. Bush ran things covertly through his “old boy” CIA networks, often using various private companies they had set up during the Bush’s illegal Iran–Contra operation of the mid-1980s.
The Iran–Contra affair was an illegal, top-secret Bush–Colonel Oliver North scheme to sell US weapons to Iran in violation of an official US arms embargo to Iran, then to divert a part of the Iran arms profits to illegally finance the CIA-backed Contras of Nicaragua, who paid for the weapons with cocaine dollars, hence the name Iran–Contra affair.
All was done without the required US congressional approval, in violation of US law. When President Jimmy Carter forced the early retirement of 800 CIA agents, many of them loyal to former CIA Director Bush, they regrouped as a private intelligence and business network, a kind of covert “deep state,” informally calling itself “the Enterprise.” This network, active for Vice President George H.W. Bush in the Iran–Contra affair, was used by Bush, now as US president, to loot and deform all of communist Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Russia under their asset, Boris Yeltsin.
George HW Bush and his banker daddy: Nazi sympathies ran deep in the Bush clan. It was and is a class question.
The companies George H.W. Bush sanctioned under the code name “the Enterprise” were soon to be responsible for the CIA-financed coup that brought down Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991. But the machinery and organization of the Enterprise was also responsible for bribing or corrupting key KGB generals and creating what came to be called the “Russian oligarchs” to loot the crown jewels of the former Soviet State, now legally known as the Russian Federation. Their looting included the entire gold reserves of the Russian National Bank in the early 1990s. That loot was funneled into the vaults of handpicked CIA-controlled banks in Switzerland, offshore bank havens, and New York.[iii]
The CIA’s Yeltsin “Democracy” Coup
The rape of Russia—the Russian nation, the Russian state, the Russian people—which began at the end of the 1980s, was a coup d’état engineered by the American CIA’s rogue and not so rogue networks directed by former CIA Director, now President, George H.W. Bush. Western accounts of what took place inside the Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years of the 1990s speak of “Russian mafia” or “Russian organized crime.” Never do they mention or even hint that those Russians who plundered their own country were organized and paid, or made rich, by the West or, to be more precise, by the old boy CIA networks loyal to former CIA director and then US president George H.W. Bush.
[iv]
Washington, covertly working with a circle of very select US and European banks, made it possible for the Yeltsin clan to loot the Russian Treasury of its gold reserves. They then offered desperately needed US money to a privatization scheme that created and installed a kleptocracy regime, and created a cabal of hyper-rich oligarchs under Yeltsin, referred to by some in the Russian media as the “Yeltsin Family,” as in the Mafia. Washington and US mainstream media cynically called it “bringing democracy and free market capitalism” to post-communist Russia.
In 1989, soon after his election, US President George H.W. Bush initiated the operation to loot the Soviet Union.
Lech Walesa: Unwitting patsy or CIA asset? Walesa was the uber lionised leader of Solidarnosc, the union he founded in 1980 in the Lenin shipyards, with the assist of the CIA and other western agencies. The struggles of Solidarnosc against the supposedly brutal communist regime [just imagine what would have happened to these guys in Chile, Argentina, or El Salvador, or any other US "client state") fueled a huge demonisation campaign across "the Free World"against the Soviet Union and energised the "liberation struggle of Poland."
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and covert US government money to Poland’s Solidarność had severely weakened Moscow’s control over Poland during the decade of the 1980s and ignited anti-communist protest movements all over communist Eastern Europe.
That Polish success—notably, that it was not suppressed by Soviet Red Army tanks as in 1956 in Hungary or during the Prague Spring of 1968—had given major encouragement to similar underground, anti-regime movements across Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe, from Hungary to Czechoslovakia to East Germany.
In Afghanistan, after ten bloody years, Soviet Red Army troops finally gave up and left the country in 1989, humiliated in defeat from CIA-trained and armed Islamist Mujahideen terrorists. In Dresden in East Germany--the German Democratic Republic as it was formally called--from the mid-1980s until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, a young KGB officer named Vladimir Putin was stationed, watching as the power of Moscow evaporated everywhere.
Moscow itself was financially in dire straits, dramatically so ever since a US State Department–Saudi oil price collapse operation was deliberately launched by Washington in 1986.[v] That oil price collapse hit at the heart of the Soviet primary hard currency sources: its oil export. That oil price collapse severely hurt Soviet earnings of badly needed dollars for Western technology purchases, as well as for countering CIA operations in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe.
The decade-long covert CIA campaign in Afghanistan, using fanatical Mujahideen terrorists mostly recruited by a Saudi CIA asset named Osama bin Laden, had given the Soviet Union what President Carter’s national security director, Zbigniew Brzezinski, later called “Russia’s Vietnam.”[vi]
Then in 1989, President George H.W. Bush gave the order to launch an all-out takeover and looting of the crown jewels of the largest and most strategic part of the USSR, the formerly communist Russian Federation. The dissolution of the Soviet Union itself rapidly followed the August 1991 Ukrainian declaration of independence from the USSR. State-owned oil and gas companies, key raw materials, such as nickel and aluminum, and high-tech Soviet military companies were the prime looting targets of select Western interests trading with insider connections.
Now finally as president, George H.W. Bush decided to go for the kill against a severely weakened Russian Federation. Bush and a CIA network of Western bankers, US government officials, and the International Monetary Fund, together with a cabal of young Harvard University economists—they were dubbed the Harvard Boys, brought into Russia by George Soros — in league with a corrupted network of KGB traitors, unleashed one of the greatest criminal looting operations in history.
Confused Russian citizens, fed up with the years of Soviet control and lack of improvement in their daily lives from Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika attempts at reforming the Soviet system, naively and with great hope turned to the West, most especially to Wall Street and Washington.
In 1987, in a desperate attempt to calm growing social unrest over the deteriorating Soviet economy, Gorbachev permitted Soviet citizens to own dollars. It was a disaster of untold dimension. Overnight, a huge black market for dollars grew and the ruble became de facto worthless inside the Soviet Union. Russians, forbidden to travel to the West, were fed the illusion that everything in America was “bigger and better.” Secret, prohibited shortwave broadcasts from the US State Department’s Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty out of Munich fed those illusions of an American capitalist paradise.
The majority of Russians believed, for the most part, nothing could be worse than life under Soviet communism with the chronic shortages in the shops, endless queues, and lack of basic goods, let alone of luxury goods. They were soon to realize they were dreadfully wrong. It could be worse.
The bottom fell out in the daily life for most Russians as Yeltsin’s clan and their Western collaborators proceeded to loot the country following the abolition of a communist state during the 1990s. Pensions went unpaid and medical insurance ended abruptly, as did daycare for working mothers and most state support.
“Operation Hammer”
Gaidar worked in league with Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs and other friends of billionaire hedge fund speculator George Soros.[vii]
Bush’s Operation Hammer used estimated tens of billions of dollars of illegal funds—funds not authorized by the US Congress—to bring down the Soviet Union. The funds reportedly came from a secret CIA war chest of undisclosed gold seized from Japan after World War II. That Japanese looted war booty was buried between 1942–1945 in Japanese-occupied Philippines for security. The gold was buried there on orders of the Emperor Hirohito in the event of Japan’s losing the war.[viii]
At some point during the 1970s, Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, nominally a Washington asset who ruled as an iron-fisted dictator from 1972 until 1986, had discovered some of the secret sites where Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers had buried gold stolen during the war. It was gold stolen from China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries occupied by imperial Japan.[ix] Greed overwhelmed Marcos’s sense of caution as he dug out the hidden gold.
The Japanese military had stashed tons of stolen gold in caves and deep underground sites on the islands. Marcos had discovered part of that and was taking it for himself and depositing it, or the cash from selling the gold onto the market, in select secretive Swiss banks. His mistake was that he used a CIA asset, Saudi billionaire arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, to help him sell the gold onto the market.[x]
In 1986, aware of what Marcos was doing through their asset, Khashoggi, among others, the CIA decided they had another use for the Marcos gold—namely, as collateral for issuing tens of billions of Western dollar securities that would be offered in the buyout of Russia’s state economic crown jewels.
Marcos, no longer of use to Washington, was driven from office in a CIA putsch that used the newly created NED as a cover to funnel millions of dollars to Marcos’s opponent, Corazon Aquino, for organizing mass street demonstrations. Washington also used a local CIA-created organization, the National Citizens Movement for Free Elections, and co-opted genuine trade union democratic opposition to the Marcos dictatorship. Aquino, far from a peoples’ candidate, was scion of one of the wealthiest Filipino oligarch families, owning vast sugarcane plantations, insuring that Aquino would look to Washington for support.[xi]
Murky Origins of Barrick Gold
In 1986, under orders from Vice President George H.W. Bush, a CIA operation was led by close Bush associates to get rid of Marcos. The operation included Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Adnan Khashoggi, the mysterious CIA-linked Saudi arms dealer who had been helping Marcos secretly sell the stolen Japanese gold. After forcing the exile of a defeated Marcos to Hawaii, Bush arranged for the Marcos gold to be deposited in special accounts at several select international banks—Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), UBS of Zurich, and Banker’s Trust, later to become part of Deutsche Bank. The Marcos gold was held in a deep underground, high-security depository in Kloten, Switzerland, beneath the Zurich International Airport.[xii]
At that same time, a murky Canadian businessman named Peter Munk, a business partner with the CIA-linked arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, cofounded a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Some years later Barrick Gold went on to become the world’s largest gold-mining company.
CIA-linked Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi played a key role in the CIA taking the Marcos gold that was collateral for the rape of Russia.
Barrick Gold was established in 1986 as American Barrick Resources and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.[xiii] Khashoggi, Marcos’s intermediary in offloading the Japanese gold onto the market, was, in fact, the majority owner of Barrick Gold. Munk, a Canadian citizen, was said to be merely the frontman for the controversial CIA-tied Saudi arms dealer.[xiv]
The operations of taking the Marcos gold from the Philippines and the founding of Barrick Gold by Khashoggi and Hungarian-born Munk were reportedly connected with the planned bankrupting and looting of the Russian Federation in the early 1990s by the clandestine network of George H.W. Bush, former CIA head and now US president.[xv]
The Marcos gold, laundered through Barrick, was to serve as collateral for the creation of billions of dollars of financial securities used to buy up priceless assets of the former Soviet state at pennies on the dollar.
Notably, although the Canadian Barrick Gold held no mines in Europe, Barrick refined its gold at two Swiss gold refineries—MKS Finance S.A. and Argor-Heraeus S.A.—both on the Italian border and just hours away from the gold depository beneath the Zurich International Airport in Kloten, Switzerland. It led to a question that Barrick never answered: what gold was Barrick refining in Switzerland, as they had no mines in that region? Some were convinced it was the Marcos gold being readied as collateral for Operation Hammer, the CIA’s rape of Russia.
E.P. Heidner, a former employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of Naval Intelligence, suggested that the Barrick Gold company had been set up by Khashoggi and Bush’s Enterprise old boys’ ex-CIA network to melt down the stolen Marcos gold and use it as collateral for billions of dollars in gold derivatives, so-called paper gold, that would stand as collateral for bank loans used in the looting of Russian state assets under Yeltsin and his notoriously corrupt economic advisers, Yegor Gaidar, and privatization head Anatoly Chubais.[xvi]
In 1992, in one of Bush’s parting acts as president, he arranged for the US government to give Barrick the mining rights for Nevada gold deposits on US government lands, independently valued at $10 billion, for the nominal sum of $63 million. President George H.W. Bush had “arranged for an exception” that would allow Barrick to use its own assessors to determine the value of the deposits. Soon after leaving office, Bush himself was named to head the International Advisory Board of Barrick Gold.[xvii]Barrick Gold had “spook,” as in CIA front company, written all over it.
The details of how much money the CIA spent buying key KGB generals, who would commit essentially treason against their Russian Federation, have not been published. However, the key KGB actors recruited by Washington to carry out the looting, players whom the CIA turned into Russian oligarchs, were gradually discovered. In the course of the Yeltsin years, as opposition grew inside Russia, more than 300 senior KGB officers, including generals, were smuggled into the US, where they were given life pensions by the US government. Others fled to Israel on Israeli passports they were given.[xviii]
Corrupt KGB Generals and Their “Kids”
In the late 1980s, well before they staged a fake coup d’état that pushed Yeltsin to the top in 1991 as the leading opposition figure to Soviet chief Mikhail Gorbachev, Philipp Bobkov and Alexei Kondaurov, two corrupt KGB generals secretly working with Bush CIA networks in the West, sponsored several clever, ruthless and ambitious young Russian entrepreneurs and arranged for them to work with a group of US financial “consultants” out of Switzerland who would teach them the fine arts and secrets of international money laundering.
Bobkov and Kondaurov handpicked four ambitious young Russians who would become the first Russian “oligarchs” in Yeltsin’s “wild west” free market Russia in the 1990s. Their names were Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alex Konanykhin, Boris Berezovsky, and Roman Abramovich.[xix] Boris Berezovsky, forty-two years old at the time, was the senior member of the young entrepreneurs. Khodorkovsky was twenty-four, Konanykhin was twenty-two, and Abramovich was also twenty-two. They thus became known within the Bush CIA circles as the “kids.”
Philipp Bobkov
General Philipp Bobkov was known within the Soviet intelligence community as the “KGB brain.” He headed the notorious KGB political police department responsible for controlling internal dissent, the infamous KGB Fifth Chief Directorate. His position enabled him to travel abroad and cultivate contacts in the West, and also with Western intelligence, without arousing undue suspicion.[xx] Alexei Kondaurov, another KGB general working with Bobkov, later joined Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil and remained, as of 2016, a Communist Party member of the Russian Federation State Duma—immune from state prosecution.[xxi]
Kondaurov and Alexander Konanykhin[xxii] had also played a key role in bringing an unknown regional politician and construction foreman named Boris Yeltsin from the hinterlands of Sverdlovsk to the forefront of Soviet Russian, and later post-Soviet Russian Federation, politics, making him known to Mikhail Gorbachev as a fresh, younger voice.[xxiii]
KGB turncoat General Alexei Kondaurov, key Yeltsin backer, went on to a top role in Khodorkovsky’s Yukos Oil, becoming very wealthy in the process. Today, he has immunity as a State Duma Communist Party member.
A third KGB general involved intimately with the Yeltsin operation was Alexander Korzhakov, Yeltsin’s personal bodyguard since 1985 and the man who stood beside Yeltsin in August 1991 when he climbed on the tank outside the Russian White House, then housing the Supreme Soviet of Russia.[xxiv] That tank stunt with Yeltsin was the turning point during the fake KGB coup attempt on Gorbachev that would propel Yeltsin to the forefront as Russia’s “democracy” opposition leader, with the help of CNN and other mainstream US and Western media. It was all carefully orchestrated.[xxv]
Two months earlier, the corrupt CIA-tied KGB generals had arranged 50 percent of Yeltsin’s campaign funding for his successful June 1991 presidential elections for the newly declared Russian Federation, defeating Gorbachev’s preferred candidate, Nikolai Ryzhkov. That gave Yeltsin invaluable credibility as opposition to Gorbachev. Yeltsin rewarded Konanykhin by granting him a banking license to found the first Russian bank with an international currency-trading license, the Russian Exchange Bank. By 1992, Konanykhin would accompany Yeltsin to Washington to meet with President George H. W. Bush.[xxvi]
Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank was another front operation for the money-laundering operations run by rogue KGB Generals Philipp Bobkov and Alexei Kondaurov, operations sanctioned personally by President Boris Yeltsin.
Beginning in 1987, Gorbachev, who had desperately sought ways of reforming the Soviet economy, had been convinced by his KGB generals to allow a touch of Western market economy for KGB-selected young communist “entrepreneurs” chosen from the Communist Party’s Komsomol youth organization. The young entrepreneurs began small companies in the USSR that were allowed to establish partnerships with Western businessmen. KGB officers usually headed the small companies, typically trading computers and such items bought from the West. Importantly, in terms of what was to happen after 1991, those enterprises had the rare privilege of getting hard currency cash, US dollars, from the Soviet State Bank.[xxvii]
The relevant point was who those Western financial or business partners committing crimes for the rogue KGB generals were. In the beginning of the Yeltsin operations in the early 1990s, two banks played a major role. One was Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C. The second was the Republic Bank of New York of Edmond Safra, which joined the looting and money-laundering Russian operations some months later.[xxviii]
Shadowy Figures of Riggs Bank
The key figures in setting up the financial structure to move Yeltsin “Family” funds out of Russia included a former Reagan–Bush administration deputy director of the National Security Council and former US Ambassador to NATO named Alton J. Keel Jr. In 1989, just as the corrupt Soviet KGB generals and their youthful protégés were setting up Menatep Bank and organizing the looting of Communist Party and Soviet assets, Keel began his term with Riggs Bank in Washington, a known CIA-tied bank since the 1960s’ Cuba Bay of Pigs CIA operations.[xxix]
Former National Security Council deputy head Alton J. Keel was Riggs Bank’s deputy chairman, responsible for Riggs’s newly created International Banking Group, which was to include a new entity, Riggs Valmet S.A. Jonathan J. Bush, a “private banker” and brother of the US President, worked with Keel to set up the Riggs–Valmet money-laundering apparatus in Geneva, aiding Riggs in buying a major share of the Geneva Valmet S.A. to create Riggs Valmet S.A.[xxx]
xxxi]
[xxxii]
When Alex. Brown was bought by the New York Bankers Trust, Beese then became vice chairman of Bankers Trust, another bank that was deeply involved in Yeltsin’s Russian financial scandals. Notably, Bankers Trust, beginning in 1982 through its Bankers Trust Zurich subsidiary, was also said to be the repository of large quantities of stolen Marcos gold.[xxxiii]
Together with Beese at Alex. Brown was a CIA consultant named Alvin Bernard “Buzzy” Krongard. When Bankers Trust acquired Alex. Brown, Krongard became vice chairman of Bankers Trust alongside Carter Beese. In 1998, as the Russian ruble collapsed, Buzzy Krongard “formally” joined the CIA, where he soon became the Executive Director, third most influential post at the CIA.[xxxiv]
Those four Riggs Bank CIA-linked shadowy figures—Beese, Krongard, Jonathan Bush, and Keel—would join with a secretive Geneva financial operation called Valmet S.A. to form a Riggs joint venture called Riggs Valmet S.A.
Riggs Valmet SA
In 1988, George H.W. Bush and his old boys, the “retired” CIA network, with the aid of Bush’s brother Jonathan, set up the Switzerland financial entity Riggs Valmet S.A., headquartered at 14 Chemin Rieu in Geneva. Riggs Valmet S.A., legally incorporated in the offshore Isle of Man, was established to set up shell companies and accounts to hide and launder money, initially for companies controlled by Bank Menatep’s Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, and other select “kids” of the corrupt Soviet KGB generals. The Geneva arm used the offshore bank’s secrecy on the Isle of Man to further hide the paper trail.[xxxv]
Without access to large Western banks, the new Yeltsin oligarchs could never have succeeded in moving tens of billions of dollars out of Russia and other newly independent former parts of the Soviet Union into Western offshore havens. For the Bush CIA network, the aim was to permanently drain the funds out of Russia into accounts in the West at their prechosen banks.
Valmet S.A., the Geneva predecessor of the Riggs joint enterprise, was a Gibraltar-registered, Geneva-based global trust business founded in 1975 by Christian Michel, who once described himself as a “self-made man.”[xxxvi]
Menatep, Runicom, and RKB
By 1994, the closest partners, or “clients,” of Riggs Valmet were Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Menatep Bank and Runicom S.A., a Swiss-registered arm of the giant Russian Sibneft Oil which, in turn, was then under the control of Roman Abramovich and his then partner, Boris Berezovsky, as well as the Moscow-based RKB bank.[xxxvii]
Conveniently, the large scandal-plagued US accounting firm Arthur Andersen was made the accountant for Runicom. Arthur Andersen itself later dissolved in a wave of corrupt accounting scandals involving companies such as the Enron Corporation of Ken Lay, another close Bush-family corporation, which was used to launder Russian energy assets.[xxxviii] The third major Russian client in 1994 of Riggs Valmet was the Moscow Rossiysky Kredit Bank, RKB.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s Group Menatep Limited, with its Menatep Bank by the mid-1990s had ballooned into a $29 billion holding company involved in numerous money-laundering scandals. From 1989 to 1991, Leonid Nevzlin was president of Bank Menatep and, until 1996, vice chairman of the board. In November 1995, Bank Menatep took part in a crooked mortgage auction that resulted in its takeover of the oil company Yukos, part of the Bush Operation Hammer plan to grab control of major Russian energy assets. In 1996, Nevzlin became vice president of Yukos, which was then 78 percent owned by Menatep.[xxxix]
Another partner of Khodorkovsky’s money-laundering Bank Menatep was Konstantin Kagalovsky, who was named deputy chairman of Bank Menatep in November 1994.
Conveniently, Kagalovsky was also Russia’s representative to the International Monetary Fund between 1992 and 1995 and was married to Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a former senior vice president of Edmond Safra’s money-laundering Bank of New York. At the time, Safra’s Bank of New York was being prosecuted in the US for a tax evasion scandal dealing with $7 billion dollars channeled out of Russia from 1996 to 1999.[xl]
During the kleptocratic presidency of Boris Yeltsin, the Runicom S.A. company enjoyed an advantage that few rivals had. Along with Abramovich and Berezovsky, a third partner in Runicom S.A. was Leonid Dyachenko,[xli] son-in-law to President Yeltsin.[xlii]
Toward the end of the 1990s, when billions of dollars of IMF funds sent to Russia—allegedly to avert a Ruble state default—disappeared, a Swiss judge revealed he had evidence that Berezovsky’s Runicom and his Sibneft Oil were implicated in diverting billions of IMF emergency loans prior to the 1998 Russia state default.[xliii]
Stealing the Soviet Gold
One of the crucial operations of the Bush looting of the Soviet Union, as part of their four-part plan, was to grab the state gold reserves. This took place early in the looting process, in March 1991, just weeks before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The theft would be critical in order to prevent a monetary defense of the ruble and, thus, to allow Washington’s financiers—such as George Soros and friends—to destabilize and severely devalue the currency, making Russian ruble assets vastly cheaper for Soros and other dollar investors.
In November 1991, just three months after the fake August 1991 KGB generals’ coup against Gorbachev was used to propel little-known Soviet official Boris Yeltsin to the fore as “champion of democracy” and of a new Russia, Viktor V. Gerashchenko, Chairman of the Presidium of Gosbank, the state bank of the USSR, made a shocking brief announcement to the Russian Duma, or parliament. Of an estimated 2,000 to perhaps 3,000 tons of Gosbank state gold reserves then worth $35 billion at the market price, less than 400 tons could be accounted for. He told the shocked members of parliament that he had “no idea” what happened to the missing gold.[xliv]That, of course, was a lie.
After 1989, as head of Gosbank, Gerashchenko had created an offshore entity, Financial Management Co., known as FIMACO, based on the island of Jersey in the Channel Islands, situated in the English Channel near Normandy, to handle Russia’s foreign currency reserves. Jersey had a curious legal standing as not a part of the United Kingdom, nor of the Commonwealth of Nations or of the European Union, but instead are part of the British Empire. This made it exempt from European supervision, an ideal place to hide money dealings.
By one estimate, the FIMACO offshore fund managed $37 billion between 1993 and 1998. The firm was a subsidiary of the Eurobank of Paris or Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord, which was 78 percent owned by Gerashchenko’s Russian Central Bank. Gerashchenko’s FIMACO funneled billions of dollars of Russian hard currency (mainly dollar) reserves out of Russia during the Yeltsin era as the first chairman of the post-Soviet, independent Central Bank of Russia.[xlv]
Not missing a trick, the well-advised Yeltsin, following the fake KGB coup attempt of August 1991, along with the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR), claimed authority over the Ministry of Finance of the entire USSR, the USSR State Bank, and the Bank of Foreign Economic Activity. This meant that the Soviet institutions could not carry out any orders without the consent of the RSFSR government, where Yeltsin was president. His finance minister was Vladimir Yefimovich Orlov. As of August 1991, Yeltsin and Orlov had control over the entire billions of dollars of Soviet gold.[xlvi] (In the next chapter, we will learn the mysterious fate of that gold.)
To cover the trail of the missing gold and give his government the pretense of innocence, Yeltsin, on the advice of two former KGB generals, announced that he had hired the New York financial detective firm Jules Kroll Associates to track the whereabouts of the Soviet gold, as well as an estimated $14 billion in Soviet Communist Party and other assets. Kroll Associates, which was tied with the CIA-created AIG insurance group of Hank Greenberg and known in the US as a “private CIA,” was linked to the CIA, Mossad, and MI-6. Not surprisingly, a few months later, Yeltsin’s finance minister and shock therapy advocate, Yegor Gaidar, announced that Kroll was being discharged as there had been “no results” in the attempt to find the billions of dollars of missing Soviet Gosbank gold.[xlvii]
Enter Safra, Soros, and Rothschild
As the scale of the looting operation in Yeltsin’s Russian Federation became so mammoth, Riggs and Bush’s CIA old boys decided to bring in another trusted group to help move the funds out of Russia.
Riggs Bank was quickly solidifying banking relations with a couple of the old CIA hands from the Iran–Contra arms-for-drugs operation, Swiss bankers Baruch “Bruce” Rappaport, a shady financier born in Haifa to Russian émigré parents, and Alfred Hartmann, his partner. Through this group, George Soros was also enlisted to open a new front against the ruble. In turn, Rappaport and Hartmann included the Bank of New York and, from Israel, the Eisenberg Group, tied to the Israeli Mossad.[xlviii]
Rappaport, a business associate of Reagan’s CIA director, Bill Casey—the man who created the idea of the private National Endowment for Democracy as a front for dirty CIA operations—also owned a major share of Edmond Safra’s Bank of New York. Further, Rappaport created a joint Swiss venture with Safra called the Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank. That Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank operation was named in 1999 by US federal investigators as being “possibly one of the biggest money-laundering schemes in the United States.”[xlix]
President George H.W. Bush knew Rappaport quite well from Rappaport’s role in helping set up the notorious CIA money-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), registered in Luxembourg with head offices in Karachi and London.
ABOVE: Funeral (Dec 2018) for a hyper-mafia kingpin. It is said that thousands attended the funeral of George HW Bush, whose send-off, with full military honors and pomp reserved for royalty, provided the first judgment of history.
In 1987, when Bush was still Reagan’s Vice President, Rappaport was under investigation by the US Independent Counsel for alleged activities on behalf of CIA Director William Casey, including the purchase of an Antiguan farm in the West Indies for Israeli arms dealers who were significant customers of BCCI in Miami. The US investigation was also looking at the circumstances behind placing Alfred Hartmann, then a BCCI employee, on the board of directors of the Inter Maritime Bank of Geneva and New York. BCCI was a major offshore private bank operating from the 1970s until it was forced shut down in 1991 by UK and other financial regulators. It was known as the bank of CIA “black operations,” of the Medellin drug cartel, and even of the US National Security Council.[l]
Edmond Safra’s Bank of New York took a 20 percent ownership of Rappaport’s Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank in Geneva. Beginning in 1992 with the CIA’s looting of Russia via handpicked oligarchs such as Khodorkovsky and Berezovsky, Safra’s Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank was deep into money laundering billions for the select Yeltsin circle of oligarchs. In 1997, Rappaport was also conveniently named as Ambassador to Yeltsin’s Russia by the government of Antigua, the scenic Caribbean Island where his Swiss American Bank, Ltd., had a banking license. Antigua became a major destination for Russian oligarchs’ looted money.[li]
As with most all of the illegal plunder operations to rob billions from the chaotic Russian Federation during the Yeltsin years, President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA head, used old cronies from past illegal CIA operations, such as Rappaport, in the dark world where CIA, Mossad, and organized crime crossed paths as congenial colleagues in crime and intelligence intrigues.
George Soros, who had sponsored Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, architect of Poland’s shock therapy, got on the inside track of obscenely profitable Russian privatization deals together with key Russian oligarchs who had opted to work with Bush and the CIA to loot their native Russia.
Soros was a major backer in the takeover of Russia’s Svyazinvest telecommunications giant. In 1994, the London Guardian would comment, “Soros’s extraordinary role, not only as the world’s most successful investor but now possibly, fantastically, as the single most powerful foreign influence in the whole of the former Soviet empire, attracts more suspicion than curiosity.”[lii]
It was at this stage that Jacob Lord Rothschild, scion of the famous banking family, joined Soros, Rappaport, and the Menatep’s Khodorkovsky as silent backers for major Russian privatization deals. In 2003, when the Russian state arrested Khodorkovsky for money laundering and tax evasion in the Menatep buyout of Yukos Oil, sending him to prison, Khodorkovsky revealed that he had signed over his shares in Yukos to Lord Rothschild just before going to prison. Rothschild, along with Henry Kissinger, sat on the international advisory board of Khodorkovsky’s Open Russia, a “charitable” foundation used to fund anti-Putin, “human rights” NGOs in Russia.[liii]
The Riggs Valmet and Bank of New York–Inter Maritime Bank looting nexus for Russian assets also involved a fugitive Swiss oil and aluminum trader named Marc Rich. Rich, reportedly a Mossad asset,[liv] had developed business ties with certain circles of the KGB involved in Western business beginning 1983, when he fled from the US to Zug, Switzerland, to avoid prosecution on an Iran oil embargo violation. When the US imposed a grain embargo on the Soviet Union that year because of their role in Afghanistan, Rich offered his high-level Soviet contacts to get grain for them from other sources. He gained top contacts in the KGB and Soviet hierarchy as a result, friends that he now would help in the great scheme to loot Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.[lv]
International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment
The rogue KGB generals and their CIA-linked cronies left nothing to chance in their plunder schemes. In September 1991, Vladimir Scherbakov, the last First Deputy Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, was told to form something called the International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment with two other partners. In 1990, just before the dissolution of the USSR, Scherbakov, a mere forty years old, was also head of the Soviet economic planning agency, Gosplan, a strategic post to put it mildly.[lvi]
The second partner of Scherbakov’s International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment has never been revealed. The third partner was the now notorious Austrian firm Nordex Energy GmbH, connected to Yeltsin’s “favorite banker,” Oleg Boyko. Boyko and his OLBI Group had dealings with, among others, the Colombian cocaine cartel—who financed the “Democratic” Party organization of Yegor Gaidar, the Yeltsin shock therapy czar whom we meet in the following chapter.[lvii]
Scherbakov’s International Foundation for Privatization and Private Investment would become identified as one of the major organizations involved in the Bank of New York’s money-laundering scandal. Interpol reported that Marc Rich was one of the founders of Nordex Energy GmbH. Notably, in one of his final acts as president, Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, some believe for Rich’s services to the US in arranging for the collapse of the Soviet Union, although Clinton’s reasons were never made public.[lviii]
This network of CIA-linked Western bankers, corrupt KGB generals, and their protégé, Boris Yeltsin, set the stage for the wholesale theft of what were now Russian Federation state assets under President Boris Yeltsin and his infamous finance minister, Yegor Gaidar. It was called shock therapy, and it was brought to Russia by George Soros and Soros’s hired hand, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs.
Endnotes:
[i] Vladimir Putin, Putin: The USSR did not need to collapse, September 23, 2016, Gazeta.ru, translated in http://rbth.com/politics_and_society/2016/09/23/putin-the-ussr-did-not-need-to-collapse_632695.
[ii] E.P. Heidner,* Collateral Damage US Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11 2001, https://wikispooks.com/w/images/d/db/Collateral_Damage_-_part_1.pdf. (*Heidner is believed to be the pen name of a former employee of the US’ DIA Office of Naval Intelligence), pp. 4-5.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Mort Zuckerman, cited in private email from Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the author, 14 August, 2011.
[v] F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics, edition.engdahl, 2012, pp. 202-203.
[vi] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The CIA’s Intervention in Afghanistan, Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, reprinted in http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
[viii] Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave, Gold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, Verso Press, 2005
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid., p.196.
[xi] Michael Barker, The American Hijacking Of The Philippines People Power Struggle, Swans.com, May 23, 2011, http://www.swans.com/library/art17/barker79.html
[xii] Sterling Seagrave, op. cit.
[xiii] Wikipedia, Barrick Gold, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrick_Gold#Founding_and_early_years
[xiv] Wikipedia, Peter Munk, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Munk.
[xv] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
[xvi] Ibid.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
[xx] Wikipedia, Phillip Bobkov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Bobkov
[xxi] Wikipedia, Alexei Kondaurov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Kondaurov
[xxiii] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
[xxiv] Gordon Logan, Understanding The Moscow Coup of August 1991, 24 August 2001, https://cryptome.org/moscow-91.htm
[xxv] Wikipedia, Alexander Korzhakov, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Korzhakov.
[xxvi] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
[xxvii] Vladimir Ivanidze, RUSSIAN SECRET SERVICES AND THE MAFIA, The Independent Information Centre Glasnost - Caucasus, The Eurasian Politician - Issue 4 (August 2001) http://users.jyu.fi/~aphamala/pe/issue4/kgbmafia.htm
[xxviii] Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, Khodorkovsky’s War Chest: I Was First to Penetrate Menatep Bank’s Money-Laundering Operation, private e-mail from former CIA financial consultant, Karon von Gerhke-Thompson, to the author, 14 August, 2011.
[xxix] Catherine Belton, Khodorkovsky’s High Stakes Gamble, Moscow Times, 16 May, 2005, http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/05/16/001.html
[xxx] Alan A. Block, Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded..., Op. Cit., p. 119
[xxxi] Wikipedia, Jonathan Bush, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Bush
[xxxii] Alan A. Block, Constance A. Weaver, All Is Clouded by Desire: Global Banking, Money Laundering, and International Organized Crime, Praeger, 2004, p. 125 ff.
[xxxiii] David G. Guyatt, Project Hammer Reloaded, Part 2 of 2, Nexus Magazine, Volume 10, Number 6 (October-November 2003), http://cruinthe.tripod.com/nexus/articles/projecthammer2.html
[xxxiv] Wikipedia, A.B. Krongard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._B._Krongard.
[xxxv] Fax from Christian Michel, Valmet S.A. to Peter Bond, Isle of Man regarding Isle of Man registered Khodorkovsky company, Jamblick Ltd. May 22, 1991, http://www.pravdambk.org/pdf/Tom010+/-312-315.pdf.
[xxxvi] Wikiliberal, Christian Michel, http://www.wikiberal.org/wiki/Christian_Michel
[xxxvii] Alan A. Block, op. cit., pp. 140-142.
[xxxviii] Ken Brown and Ianthe Jeanne Dugan, Arthur Andersen’s Fall From Grace Is a Sad Tale of Greed and Miscues, The Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2002, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1023409436545200
[xxxix] Wikipedia, Bank Menatep, http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bank_Menatep
[xl] Ibid.
[xli] Michael Wines, Runicom and Yeltsin Son in Law at Center Of Rich Network of Influence, October 7, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/07/world/yeltsin-son-in-law-at-center-of-rich-network-of-influence.html
[xlii] Alan A. Block, op. cit., p. 140-142.
[xliii] Ibid., p. 142.
[xliv] Blog post, Organized crime and the former Soviet Union,
http://www.marxmail.org/archives/February99/crime_ussr.htm
[xlv] David Hoffman, Russian Central Bank Accused of Scheme, Washington Post, February 27, 1999, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/stories/bank022799.htm.
[xlvi] Wikipedia, Ministry of Finance (Soviet Union), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Finance_(Soviet_Union)#CITEREFLCitSU1992
[xlvii] Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, University of Washington Press, 1996, forward by Michael McFaul, later to be US Ambassador to Russia, p. 117.
[xlviii] Edward Hendrie, 9/11: Enemies Foreign and Domestic, 2011, Great Mountain Publishing, p.125. See also, E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
[xlix] Timothy L. O’Brien, Raymond Bonner, Russian Money Laundering Investigation Finds a Familiar Swiss Banker in the Middle, August 22, 1999, http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/22/world/russian-money-laundering-investigation-finds-familiar-swiss-banker-middle.html.
[l] Wikipedia, Bank of Credit and Commerce International, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Credit_and_Commerce_International
[li] Juliet Benjamin, Rappaport Dies, The Antigua Daily Observer, January 9, 2010, http://antiguaobserver.com/rappaport-dies/
[lii] London Guardian, 1994, cited in http://theunhivedmind.com/UHM/jewish-dominance-in-the-capitalist-takeover-of-todays-russia/
[liv] Edward Hendrie, op. cit.
[lv] Newsmax, Mark Rich Helped KGB Create Hidden Government, March 31, 2001
[lvi] Forbes, Billionaire Profile: Vladimir Shcherbakov, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/profile/vladimir-scherbakov/
[lviii] E.P. Heidner, op. cit.
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